Tangled Up in Blue

So, you think R.I.P.D. – a buddy-cop comedy in which undead veteran cop Jeff Bridges teams with newbie Ryan Reynolds – is a novel twist on the genre? Heck, it’s not even the first buddy-cop movie with undead partners.

There’s really only one rule in the buddy-cop genre: Don’t partner with Clint Eastwood if you want to live until the credits roll, since Dirty Harry’s partners have the life expectancy of Spinal Tap drummers and Hogwarts Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers. Otherwise, it’s pretty much anything goes. You want to partner a grizzled, jaded cop with a hologram, or an uptight, by-the-book cop with a talking carrot? You can put pretty much any combination of two sleuths together, no matter how bizarre, as these 10 examples show.